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East 42nd Street, Midtown Manhattan The Ford Foundation Building, built in 1963- 67 and designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates, is recognized as one of the most successful and admired modern buildings to emerge in New York City following World War II. The Ford Foundation, the nation's largest private foundation, commissioned an independent headquarters building through the inspiration of its then president, Henry Heald, who in his former position at the Illinois Institute of Technology had overseen the construction of the Mies van der Rohe-designed campus, a major monument of the modern movement. The Foundation's architects created an elegant, transparent glass cube, just twelve stories tall, framed in exposed Cor-Ten weathering steel (also known as controlled-rusting steel) and mahogany-colored South Dakota granite that clads poured concrete piers, encompassing a lush landscaped full-height atrium that occupies most of the building and is visible from the outside. The architects, in an approach unusual for modern movement buildings in the 1960s, carefully considered the context of the surrounding neighborhood in planning the building's design. The building's twelve-story height matches the set-back line of the office buildings directly to the west. By placing the main entrance with its driveway on East 43rd Street, the designers deliberately created a grand scenic approach road for the building due to local one-way street patterns. Among the many critics who have extolled its design, Ada Louise Huxtable called the Ford Foundation Building a "civic gesture of beauty and excellence.'" The main focus of the East 42nd Street facade is the recessed wall of glass, with panes of glass framed in weathering steel, through which the interior atrium and garden are visible. At the top, a catwalk and two floors of offices above it project progressively outward from the glass wall, all topped by a steel I-beam. A narrow, granite-faced concrete pier rises uninterrupted at the eastern corner; from the pier's western edge, a matching, diagonal granite-faced wall angles back to meet the recessed glass wall. A similar granite-faced pier rises on the west, with a receding diagonal wall connecting to the recessed wall of glass; the two piers frame the main portion of the glass wall. The second granite-faced pier forms a protective space for the entrance to the atrium. There is an additional, narrow, recessed glass area to the west of that second pier, which hides a fire stair exit door; it is flanked in turn on the west by a much wider expanse of granite-faced wall, which bears the carved date of 1967. The third and fourth bays (from the east) of the main glass wall contain the entrance consisting of a revolving door of polished bronze and glass in a polished bronze housing, flanked by single-leaf doors of polished bronze and glass with vertical pulls, set on the diagonal. - From the 1997 NYCLPC designation report.

By: Emilio Guerra Copyright © All Rights Reserved

Taken: October 10, 2009
Uploaded: November 11, 2009

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